I don’t do legal highs. Recreational narcotics should be far more mellow and less shrill than the bump and grind available legally over the counter. What I do do is regulation.
The Psychoactive Substances Act 2013 is a first step towards putting science first when determining regulation of highs. The regulation has gotten legal highs out of Dairy’s and into R18 retailers and created a panel that needs to be convinced of the low risk threshold these products represent. Those products the panel has questions over are removed from shops as has recently happened.
If only alcohol, tobacco and gambling were as tightly regulated. I find it difficult to get excited about stamping down on legal highs when booze and ciggies kill tens of thousands and gambling is an empire built upon misery.
The opposite of regulating the market is to empower organised crime and vast criminalisation of the population which of course would be met with a Police request for more over the top powers and even more pointless funding in the war against drugs.
I am MCing the Pathway to Reform conference on drug regulation this Month on the 20th and the entire conference will be live streamed here on The Daily Blog. Of most interest will be the political panel where Parties will be asked to state their position on drug reform.
It is a debate that is timely. The recent hijacking of the intent of the Local Approved Products Policy [LAPP] has seen Local Councils use loopholes like a retailer being within 100meters of culturally important sites to shut them down. In one case that was because a retailer was near a river! The Councils will be met by a legal challenge and the cost will hurt ratepayers.
The only ones happy with these retailers being shut down will be organised crime.
These local council hijackings of intent to produce bylaws to shut down legal high retailers have been fed by a media all too happy to ignore the death rate from big advertisers like booze to myopically foster a climate of disinformation.
Last year blogger Max Dillon Coyle highlighted the lengths some journalists will go to malign the legal high industry…
To add even more background to my understanding, I was working at a local newspaper where the reporter made it her personal mission to spend most days working of this story and putting it on the front page week after week. Never mind that there was no story, when there wasn’t a story she would give beer to young men to go and get them to engage in sting operations attempting to buy synthetic cannabis from dairies. When that failed she reported it anyway and instead of facts used a whole bunch of dark adjectives to describe the ‘feeling’ of the place that sold these evil things and classic tabloid reporting lines like ‘the owner Mr Patel, wearing a heavy coat, was observed leaving the cold grey store and scurrying to his car’
In such a climate of misinformation, Councils need to look to science the way they have over the anti-fluoridation debate. Councils and media should watch the conference as global speakers debate the latest research into drug regulation.
The scientific and medical panel set up to decide if a product is low risk enough to regulate should be allowed to turn its eye to Cannabis so that NZ can at least catch up with America.
The irony is that the very moment Cannabis is decriminalised, the legal high market will all but evaporate.
What about the reporters and local body politicians who are reacting to real, actual events brought to them by desperate parents and partners? Lives really are being ruined by this crud.
You’ve picked on one hyper-alert manipulative reporter and ignored the hard and honest work done by many reporters to expose what the synthetic high industry is trying to hide.
Other than that, good blog.
See this assertion from Minister Dunne made pre the Bill passing . . . >
Q. Will this just backfire and create a bigger black market?
Dunne: “No. We expect that having low risk psychoactive products legally available will discourage consumers from using the black market.”
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1207/S00177/dunne-drug-law-reversing-onus-of-proof-on-way.htm
The point being is that Hamiltonians are now forced into the black market, which undermines the purpose of the Act as stated by the Minister.
Ironically, based on expert evidence around the harms of prohibition – The STAR Trust is doing more to protect the wellbeing of Hamiltonians, whilst the HCC is actually causing more harms by forcing prohibition onto the community.
From my experience making submissions – and especially in Hamilton – most councillors are simply uninformed and/or ill informed around the issues and sadly they have not had access to all the expert advice that Central Government had when reviewing the Psychoactive Substances Bill.
The Central body politicians that heard the evidence and reviewed the NZ Law Commission report in 2011 voted 119 to John Banks 1 vote in favour of regulation and setting up a licensed retail channel for approved low risk products. The Local Body politicians that did not see all the expert evidence and advice voted for prohibition.
Hence the truth is that the Council were cajoled by a vocal minority in the community supported by lots of media pressure. Promises were made to get a positive media profile during the local body elections last year. Promises that were fulfilled when every licensed retailer in Hamilton was shut down last week.
We need to rectify this injustice for the sake the future success of the Act and the wellbeing of NZ society!
Bullshit.
The black market is actually preferable for most people in Hamilton as it doesn’t entail certain areas of town having to endure all day congregations of substance abusers and the problems they bring with them. After all people in Hamilton don’t stay awake all night worrying about tinnie houses, because the people who run them have to keep a low profile.
The truth is that the problems caused by the legal high retailer in Hamilton East managed to really piss off most of the city, and that’s what caused the council to act. This time it went far beyond the usual complainers because the puff shop managed to annoy the people who usually say “live and let live”.
No its not bullshit and I live in a cbd with legal high shops present.
The black market is preferable? Where do you get your logic from? Historically prohibition creates more problems than it tries to remove.
You say alcohol is a public health problem. Correct, it is a psychoactive substance and is addictive, just like weed, legal highs, nicotine etc? All psychoactive substances have the capacity to be health problems, that is why its better to regulate them to minimize risk.
What I cannot fathom is why the councils just make a bylaw that you cant consume psychoactive substances in public?
And when I mean all psychoactive substances, that includes alcohol and nicotine.
Sick of walking through people outside of cafes and restaurants smoking and drinking psychoactive substances on public walkways while children are about. I do not go out at night at the weekend in the cbd because of the violence and health risks present due to alcohol.
I want alcohol and cigarettes out of supermarkets. Biggest “tinnie” houses around, the volume of psychoactive substances they sell daily makes puff shops a joke.
The truth is the problem in Hamilton is not about legal highs, it exposes a serious problem which afflicts all of our communities, too much greed, hoarding of wealth, low liquidity levels, dropping parental standards, dropping academic standards, lack of meaningful jobs, increased cost of living and too much easy credit. All of this is creating mental health issues which drives excessive consumption of psychoactive substances.
You don’t understand. The HCC made a decision because of problems that were uniquely affecting Hamilton. Whatever happens with legal highs in other places may be different and is not our problem.
The fact is that the legal high shop in Hamilton East had become a major social problem in Hamilton. The shop was making life intolerable for other users of the street. You may think it is acceptable to have aggressive begging, sexual harassment, public defecation and intoxication in your neighbourhood, but Hamilton East residents do not.
You can talk all you like about irrelevant matters such as prohibition, but it doesn’t matter at all. Hamilton’s problem was not a drug problem, but an anti-social behaviour problem caused by a particular legal high outlet – the owner of which was making money at everyone else’s expense.
Your post is a prime example of why the left wing often shoot themselves in the foot. In this case you have most of the population of a city legitimately complaining about a public order problem that is negatively affecting them and your response is to lecture them with recycled conspiracy arguments about how the man is banning weed just to let big pharma cash in. Nobody cares about that when the immediate problem is that people are shitting in public.
Are there not laws in Hamilton that ban public shitting? That seems like a better approach.
The Act of shitting in public is quite clearly ‘offensive’ to public health and insofar as it creates a victim; the person who has the unenviable task of having to clean it up.
Whereas the consumption of cannabis is a consensual adult act that impinges on no one. Indeed the current response is to arrest someone and turn them into a victim in the name of public health and order.
Shitting does not offend the right to cognitive liberty, it offends the nose. The former disturbs democracy while the latter occurs so infrequently that is of no consequence unless your the one who finds it on their shoes.
The argument that cannabis is banned because (pick your conspiracy theory) and thus easily ignored in spite of prohibitions consequences ignores that the policy has never been tested for its efficacy.
When around 1996-8 the Ministry of Health allocated fifty thousand dollars p/a towards doing exactly that, the budget was dropped (probably under Ministerial direction) apparently, due to “legislative implications”…
At about that time I arranged for Harvard Economics Professor J. Miron to give me a quote to pass onto the review process at the time. We would had change from the first year…. and accumulated a mere half a million in the coffers to review it again today!
Well bugger me!
And that is a shit policy standard.
Thanks Bomber. Most commentators I read are in agreement – let’s move forward, not back into Nixon’s prohibitionist era. It is time for change – but it will only happen if we get rid of Peter Dunnce and the Natz. If they remain in power we will see the continuation of the mindless approaches that are racist (yep – Maori are attacked by this repressive regime), ageist (young are hit hardest), classist (poor people are targeted), sexist (males are typically criminalised). In addition to this we see that chronically and terminally ill are also militated against by these criminal policies. And why? So the booze barons and big pharma can maintain their evil monopoly of the market.
It’s time for reason and rights to take centre stage instead of underhanded deals with the real drug pushers and alcohopolists.
You just have it wrong. If you haven’t been a regular visitor to Hamilton East over the last six months, you just have no idea what you are talking about.
Most people here in Hamilton don’t care if other people smoke weed, the same as they don’t care if other people like to drink alcohol. If there are problems with those things, they are public health problems and need to be addressed the way that public health problems are addressed.
The problem in Hamilton was that the legal high retailer in Hamilton East was a magnet for all sorts of anti-social behaviour such that ordinary people had started giving the place a wide berth. I personally think that prohibition is a bad idea, but if the alternative is people taking dumps in public and frightening the crap out of ordinary people going about their own business, then prohibition is better for the time being.
To be honest, the best place to sell legal highs in Hamilton would be near the police station, as this would keep the anti-social behaviour under control.
Why were the police not doing anything about the anti-social behaviour? I don’t buy the “not enough hours in the day or dollars in the bank” argument because in my home town the coppers were basically camped outside the main seller doing WoF and rego checks, enforcing fine payment and such and we don’t have nearly the scale of problem the Tron sounds like it’s got.
Anyway, I can understand cleaning up a mess like that retailer but i don’t understand why it has to be done with what amounts to a blanket ban, sledgehammers and waluts ya know. Surely if there’s a way of dealing with specific Liquor Licenced premises that cause issues then there’s a way of dealing with other legal high retailers in a similar manner.
In the Otaki electorate, there is a shop 3 doors down from Nathan guys office that sells that legal high shit.. Guys office has a sign on window stating we do not support the sales of legal highs
haha WTF????
THEN ban them then you useless twat or maybe youre getting yet more back handers for these shops to sell this shit that is destroying this community….
Going to have to disagree here. The councils are only reacting to poor legislation from the government.
For the record, I support legalisation of cannabis and would wish it to be sold over the counter anywhere cigarettes or alcohol can currently be sold, even though I have not used cannabis myself in the last decade and probably never will again.
Here in Hamilton there have been massive problems with legal highs. A shop selling them opened in Hamilton East and this caused a parade of ne’er do wells that lasted pretty much all day in and out of the shop, and drug use in near by streets and parks. Pedestrians were being harassed, aggressive begging was the norm, and local retailers were being harassed and losing business to other areas of town. Everyone I know who has visited Hamilton East in the last few months has commented on how nasty it had got, even people who don’t normally care about such things. People who live and work on that street have had an absolutely shit time, and one local government agency has had to hire a security guard to stop employees (in particular female employees) from being harassed on their way in and out of work.
If the government is going to legalise these substances, it needs to consider the externalities borne by the rest of society. In particular, having all users congregate into particular areas morning, noon and night does much to make those areas undesirable for everyone else.
Either have them sold everywhere, so that this won’t happen, or have them sold nowhere. In theory it sounds fine to have legalised highs and brothels, but the problem is that these industries tend to be run and patronised by shitheads to the detriment of everyone else.
Ok, you’re from Hamilton and I’m not even living in NZ at the moment so maybe you can clear this up for me… I understand that when prostitution was legalised brothels opened all over the city and some caused hassles. Hamilton council to its credit acted quicker than most and passed a raft of laws making running a brothel illegal in most of the city. I believe this helped until the bylaws were challenged in court (I remember reading about this bit) and struck down as overly restrictive and ammounting to defacto prohibition. Things then went back to shit until the council drafted a more moderate set of restrictions.
My questions are, do i have this roughly correct? If so aren’t we likely to see the same thing play out with these legal highs? Shouldn’t the council have drafted legislation in good faith, ie in an attempt to make the law work as enviaged by Dunne and co rather than as a defacto tool of prohibition?
Just legalise the real thing already, there’s plenty of studies that dismiss the harm that is stereotypically attributed to it and indeed many possibilities of medicinal benefit. Also the possibility of a new industry can’t do harm with the possibility of creating jobs and extra revenue through taxes.
In my opinion the greatest harm facing humanity is a poor diet. There’s already a rise and expected explosion of ill-health related to a poor, processed diet in the developing world that will eclipse that experienced in the developed world.
What I can’t understand; why is wholemeal flour, brown rice and brown bread more expensive than their processed counterparts? A grain product that retains its bran doesn’t go through extra processes therefore I assume should logically be cheaper to produce? In pre-war Europe white bread was more expensive than brown. To me this is an example of how “committed” the current system is of ensuring people have a healthier diet.
Anyway, this country is such a dead-end conservative backwater I can’t imagine any progress taking place too soon. Prejudice rules as well as dominating any official discourse. The bogeyman of drugs is a convenient scapegoat for the many ills of the system, just think about forestry deaths where the employees are driven like slaves, instead drugs are cited as the issue.
Tougher laws on drugs introduced by this government are a perfect means of profiteering from the poor. Someone poor and who has a fondness for cannabis to relieve their drudgery, when caught with their crop can face the possibility of whatever meagre possessions they have being confiscated. Even those who sell their crop are hardly big time dealers usually making a meagre profit to pay for necessities such as an old bomb of a vehicle, bills or tools; as I have been aware of in such cases.
I’ve never taken nor are interested in taking drugs, but throughout my life I find cannabis is an extremely prevalent drug used in this country. I was raised and continue to live around many pot-heads, on the whole peaceful well-intentioned people, usually at the bottom end of society. I’m convinced this entire program of criminalisation is nothing more than a warped control-freak conservative Establishment jackboot to keep those they find undesirable based on their warped prejudices, firmly down-and-out for whatever sadistic pleasure they seek. A pleasure similar to that found with a cat who catches a mouse and plays or more correctly tortures it to death.
Andy K says,”What I can’t understand; why is wholemeal flour, brown rice and brown bread more expensive than their processed counterparts?”
The simple answer would be supply and demand. In the same way automatic gear shift cars use to be more expensive that “three on the tree” in the U.S. but, now there are more automatic cars than manual, it costs more to buy a “sports” model with gear shift.
Absolutely legalise cannabis. Growable and free, it will eliminate all other dangerous highs except alcohol. The idiots that oppose it have created the other problems of harder drugs and “legal high” poisons. But when cannabis is legal, we can teach educated use. Sure put a reasonably old date of legal usage on it. Tax it. But let everybody grown there own and you destroy the drug trade. The need and desire for it eventually disappears. No mental trauma occurring with it, would not have occurred without it. It’s erroneous horror image was created by manipulative governing idiots in the US long ago. There is no need for people like Dunne to emulate them.
” There’s no such thing as dangerous drugs , just dangerous drug users . ”
Barry Crump . RIP .
They can try and outlaw synth cannabis all they want. it won’t work. there are millions of chemicals they can use. We need to follow California and Colorado’s lead and legalise.
I grew up in a family of alcoholics and I can tell you alcohol is much worse and much more destructive. Everyone knows this yet Cannabis is still illegal.
Even the Greens and Labour are afraid to come forward and say they want it decriminalized. The whole thing is ridiculous. Watching the doco “stoned kids” on youtube by vice mag. Cannabis has much more medicinal properties than we are giving it credit for. By keeping it illegal we’re not able to impose any age restrictions or safety regulations.
it’s just plain madness.
Actually, there were lots of news stories only about a month ago, pointing out that that Greens are in favour of decriminalising marijuana. The stories were designed to scare voters but at least they let everyone know that if they want marijuana decriminalised, they should vote for the Green Party
When we legalise cannabis (and I hope other substances) we must also pardon those still serving sentences and wipe drug convictions from people’s records. Otherwise we’ll have the situation that we are seeing in the states, where generations of young black men have been criminalised and oppressed, and a new wave of white entrepreneurs is making a buck off something that is now legal. We can learn from this. It would be an atrocious development if young libertarian ACT types became rich from a commerce which has filled our prisons with young Maori. Let’s do it properly.
@ Ovicula . I very much agree . It will be quite the day when common sense overcomes greed and stupidity .
Putting people in prisons for drug usage will , in time to come , seem bizarre and pointless .
The Western Leader is so right (especially in an election year) in attributing the obvious citywide increase in begging to the legalisation and consequent availability.of synthetic canabis. This means that despite their goal of cutting welfare benefit numbers by 40 000, despite the punitive sanctions imposed as a means of achieving this goal, despite the local manifestations of a global financial crisis, despite the number of layoffs continuing to exceed jobs created, it is possible for the Minister of Social Development and her cabinet collegues to plausibly continue claiming to have delivered on their past promises of a brighter future. John Key can continue basking in well-deserved popularity, and beneficiaries can still be stigmatised as if they were all drug addicts.
The blame the misery endured by society’s most unfortunate can instead be shared either with the other political parties that voted to legalise harmful psychoactivesubstances, or with the victims themselves. One has the privilege of being free to choose.
Some folk have been audacious enough to suggest decriminalsation of marijuana itself could be be more effective than prohibition in weaning addicts off the stuff. However harmless natural marijuana may be, this must not be allowed to happen. Apart from the consequent loss of revenue to the pharmaceutical companies (no mean consideration in itself) the dole queues would be flooded by gang members whose enterprising livelihood has been taken off them, It would no longer be possible for the government to disguise the true level of uneployment, and this just might effect its chances of winning another election. One only need look to the outstanding success of the zero-tolerance policies pursued by such countries as Mexico and Columbia to restore one to the path of right thinking.
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